Posts by Joseph Puopolo


Printchomp Turns 5

Printchomp Turns 5


Posted By on Sep 12, 2017

We have seen a lot of changes in 5 years, and we keep growing. We launched our product to the world 5 years ago to the world at Techcrunch Disrupt with the intent of connecting people with local printers. Our goal is to make printing quicker, easier and more cost effective than traditional methods. While there have been some ups and downs, we have had many amazing accomplishments and customers in five years: Printed millions of business cards and countless other products Processed 10s of thousands of orders Connected 20k + printers through print network Growing a business often takes far longer than one hopes or expects. With unexpected ups and downs comes turmoil and changes. Our team as grown, shrunk dramatically, and now we are growing again. I want to thank Declan Whelan, our original CTO and Co-Founder, and the rest of the people who have contributed their time and energy to build the company. But we must look forward and continue to evolve the platform and grow the company to its next stage. Our team’s expertise got many things right in our first iteration, but there were several technical, marketing and operations items that prevented us from growing as quickly as we would have liked or hoped. Our MVP worked, but we couldn’t scale with how we built the app/company. After speaking to a lot of customers and figuring out what worked well and what needed tweaking, we put our heads down and got to work. After a lot of work and dev efforts, we are happy to announce the largest new launch since the initial release of Printchomp. We fundamentally changed the way the app functions, and stripped it down to its most basic feature set to provide a simple but elegant experience. Why? Easier to Use Faster to Order Easy to Re-Order Focused user experiences Tighter integration with partners to give better options In the coming months we have an aggressive schedule to evolve the platform and take it to the next level. We will be actively soliciting more feedback from customers to make the user experience even better. Our goal is to continue to make Printchomp the destination for printers and print buyers to order print. In one week we relaunch the next generation of Printchomp with our network of 20000+ printers. We are tweaking it up and squashing bugs, and look forward to unveiling our hard work soon! To my fellow entrepreneurs, success is rarely a straight line. There are many opportunities to take the off ramp and give up. Don’t give up work hard, be smart and you will get there....

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Over the past year I have been tracking some pretty crazy activity on social media, specifically Twitter. I have long believed there has been an active campaign of bots trying to influence behaviour online. As a fan of Harrison Ford I loved the movie of Bladerunner. An officer sought to differentiate people from bots. I started to catalog repeatable behaviours, I wanted to share my guide of how to spot bots and how to fight them. So here we go … Amazing the number of bots that engage me, they have an obvious tell and I catch them all the time #Bladerunner pic.twitter.com/0Nkmso4SP4 — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 An obvious tell of a bot is that their Profile is hash-tagged to death, they don't directly respond to your commentary and other — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 2/10 – Profile images are generally themed to a certain message#Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 3/10 – Most of the bots are less than a year old#Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 5/10 – The response to your tweets with something that states an opinion but not in context #Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 6/10 – Bots usually swarm via mentioning other bots to create a gang up tactic. #Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 7/10 – Once in a bot swarm, most will insult you or try to shout you down to make you quiet. #Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 8/10 – Bot's don't know how to respond to positivity, they expect for you to yell. Be polite!#Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 9/10 – Bot's won't do math, ask them to do a basic math question. See if they even acknowledge it.#Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 How to spot a bot! 10/10 – Report all bots. Twitter and other social networks are self monitored. #Bots#SocialMedia — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 To summarize on #Bots – they are actively being used to shape conversation, socially engineer responses. Respond back with greater force — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 Please share these top 10 things to spot #bots on Twitter. It is a simple act of democracy from not letting them pollute the feed! — Joseph Puopolo (@jpuopolo) June 4, 2017 Then it got out of hand …. How to spot a bot...

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Sometimes you fail. It has been a year. A whole year since my last episode. You start these things with the best intentions then life sometimes gets in the way. Whether it be running a few companies, building a new house or chasing 2 kids under 5, something had to give and it was the show. Fast forward a year,  things are more settled with me on a number of fronts and my little girl started a show with my help and then encouraged me to go back to mine. I wanted to share some of my learnings around helping to create a web show or video blog 4 Tips to Set up a Video BlogI wanted to share 4 Tips to Set up a Video Blog It has been a while since I have posted, but here is my latest. I am changing up the format of my posts and don’t less driven based upon interviews. My first post back is sharing what I have learned for setting up your own video blog or web show. Posted by The Anything Show on Tuesday, June 14,...

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Joseph sits down with Ben Parr to discuss Apple, Apple’s Cash hoard, the Apple Car? Social media, inspiration for his book, inequity in tech. Check out his new book on Amazon – one of many shameless plugs 🙂 Joseph learns a valuable lesson that you should never upload a podcast on unreliable Hotel Wifi as it took him nearly a week of failed attempts....

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Marketing Automation is becoming a premium for small and large organizations. Over the past 15 years there has been increased pressure to squeeze the most one can out of their marketing dollars. Typically this falls into two camps, the actual money spent on marketing initiatives and the money spent towards the headcount to administer them. The marketing automation dilemma You essentially have a back and forth issue. You don’t want to strip headcount too badly, because it will be difficult to administer campaigns, but you want to maximize the amount you spend on external campaigns that drive people back to your site and drive interest. The first step to solving this dilemma So now you recognize you have this dilemma and the question of how to make strides to maximizing my headcount and at the same time spend money on initiatives that will drive revenue, retention, sign-ups or whatever your key success metrics are. What are the next steps? Strip away non-value additive activities via automation Busy work is the bane of anyone’s existence, but it should also be the first thing in your organization you look to remedy. Physically handling mailing items, stuffing envelopes, or even spending the time managing 3rd parties to do this isn’t additive. In many cases manual interactions not only increase the time that you spend doing other things, but also increase the chance of errors. The irony of introducing more manual work is that it introduces more errors that may require further work to manage. At the end of the day, outsourcing these operations to a 3rd party is crucial to improve efficiency. It improves efficiency for a number of reasons: You won’t ever be able to do something as effectively as a specialized shop – Typically if you are printing and stuffing envelopes, your cost per impression is much higher than a 3rd party shop. You have to consider the time for anyone babysitting the exercise of printing and mailing Print on demand vs. Inventory – One of the essential problems with all in house marketing activities is that you have to print extra and warehouse those extra pieces. Initiate from your systems rather than a spreadsheet – If you have systems for managing people and operations, then why are you exporting to a spreadsheet and manually hand holding the process to completion. It wastes time, while you could automate the entire process. Enter a Print & Mail API  A print and mail API is the perfect solution to move manual tasks off of the plate of marketers and just making sure things “happen” on their own automatically.  There are many marketing professionals that...

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